Demonstration Of Ethics Hume's Emotion And Its Objectives

Facing the context of Religion Evolution and Scottish Movement, in order to seek the new origin of the moral, David Hume did try to introduce the experimental reasoning method to human mind. Hume thought that all efforts from ancient to his time failed due to rationalism dogmatism or confusing fact (is) with value (ought), thus drew the wrong conclusion. By researching his predecessors Hutchison and Mandeville, Hume did not think moral could be found form rational deduction, rather the sense of pain and pleasure which could not be reduced further. He shifted traditional triachotomy (understanding, passion and will) to dichotomy (understanding and passion), in which will loses its independence and only belongs to a kind of passions.Whether the actions triggered by the passions are useful or pleasant becomes the basis of people' s approval or disapproval. And just because of that point, people make their moral judgments and moral sanctions come into being. According to Hume, actions themselves can not show anything, but the motive and effect reflected from the actions report everything, in which the sympathy acted as a bridge makes it possible whenever and wherever. Presenting and analyzing the idea of sympathy prevents Hume' s theory from the defect of personal subjectivism.At the same time, because of his peculiar metaphysical and epistemological theory (mainly, what appears is what it actually is), Hume denied the self substance completely (the self is merely a bunch of perceptions), and limited the reason as instrumental reason, so emotionalism moral doctrine finally found its position of existence and development beyond the chain of nature cause and effect, i.e. gaining its necessity. Equally important, with the function of sympathy, psychological sense of pain and pleasure can be reasonably translated into ethical sense of virtue and vice, and the personal judgments of liking or dislike into public moral judgments. Thus, moral theory once again finds its foundation in the background of new civil society without ancient Greek cities or Scholastic Christianity.Apart from that, by the sympathy emotional moral theory necessarily implies the respect to public spirit, also beyond personal interest and consideration to general position, which embodies emotional alteration or empathy (Einfuhlung in German) in experience and intersubjectivity. Just in this sense, we conclude that the essential purpose of Humean moral theory is to build human being science, that is to say, he designed the civil standard image in accordance with bourgeois' taste and sentiment, a kind of eternal gentlemen' s good personality, and all in all a kind of taste ethics, a life ethics.In order to clearly illustrate Humean ideas and his steps of argumentation, I frequently place his thoughts in contrast with rationalism and Chinese thoughts for showing its special significance in today China' s moral construction.